1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to organizing and accessing entries in a web page list and in particular to organizing a web page list to easily locate and retrieve relevant pages based on content. Still more particularly, the present invention relates to employing keywords and search terms in connection with a web page list to facilitate location and retrieval of relevant pages based on content.
2. Description of the Related Art
Almost all hypertext systems, including web browsers, provide a facility listing particular sites on the Internet for quick, easy access. Such a facility is normally referred to as a bookmark or “favorites” list, a history list, a hotlist, or “channels.” These lists are typically displayed within a browser or other communications management utility (such as Windows™ Explorer) as a textual list of titles which may be selected in “point-and-click” fashion by the user. Often a user may add new entries to the list, alter the title or Uniform Resource Locator (URL) associated with a list entry, reorder entries, or delete one or more entries from the list. Some lists simply identify, on a rolling basis, a specified number of the last sites which a user visited using the browser.
Several organizational problems attend these lists as they are currently implemented and employed. First, by nature these lists offer minimal insight into the content represented by an entry. The problem is analogous to locating a desired book or volume within a library. To locate a particular volume in a library with only ten books is usually easy. Even if the cover or table of contents of each of the ten volumes must be inspected to determine the content, this takes only a few minutes, at most. Locating the same volume within a library of 300,000 books, however, can be much more difficult and time consuming.
Furthermore, lists of this type continually expand as the user's web browsing continues, quickly growing past a generally manageable size. Users often accumulate hundreds of bookmarks in their bookmark lists, while history lists can expand to thousands of entries depending on browser settings. Although the linear nature of such lists demands organization to efficiently locate relevant entries, no automated mechanism for organizing these lists exists. Users typically do not spend the time required to organize their bookmark lists, and history list organization is constrained by whichever sorting mechanisms are supported by the browser (e.g., by URL, name, first visited, last visited, etc.). Even if organized, however, the organization may not provide sufficient information to enable selection of the appropriate site based upon content.
The problem is further complicated when a group of users shares a common set of bookmarks, such as when one user sends a bookmark file to another or when multiple users employ the same machine with a common or standard bookmark and history configuration. In either case, the user wishing to locate particular content from the list(s) may find the proper bookmark or history entry only by manually searching recursively through folders of shared bookmarks, and in some cases actually retrieving the associated web pages to ascertain the content.
The problem, as illustrated by the library analogy above, revolves around scale, but is also compounded by the fact that categorized bookmark or history entries may fit into more than one designated category. While “folders” within such lists are designed to provide a useful classification system for the entries, the categorization for a bookmark or history entry which best identifies the linked content may change over time and may not be intuitive across all users.
It would be desirable, therefore, to provide a mechanism allowing the user to efficiently and automatically locate hotlist entries related to a topic of interest, without requiring substantial organizational overhead. It would further be advantageous for the mechanism to automatically index a site to facilitate location of desired content when each bookmark or history entry is created.